Small is Again Beautiful in Description Logics

Abstract

The Description Logic (DL) research of the last 20 years was mainly concerned with increasing the expressive power of the employed description language without losing the ability of implementing highly-optimized reasoning systems that behave well in practice, in spite of the ever increasing worst-case complexity of the underlying inference problems. OWL DL, the standard ontology language for the Semantic Web, is based on such an expressive DL for which reasoning is highly intractable. Its sublanguage OWL Lite was intended to provide a tractable version of OWL, but turned out to be only of a slightly lower worst-case complexity than OWL DL. This and other reasons have led to the development of two new families of light-weight DLs, $\mathcal{EL}$ and DL-Lite, which recently have been proposed as profiles of OWL 2, the new version of the OWL standard. In this paper, we give an introduction to these new logics, explaining the rationales behind their design.